Getting Dressed: the Ravenmaster Brigid Keenan
The Tower of London’s Ravenmaster mourns his missing raven
In January, Merlina, ‘queen’ raven at the Tower of London, went missing. She hasn’t been seen since.
Much hangs on the ravens – everyone knows the legend that if the ravens disappear, the Tower and the kingdom will crumble.
There are seven ravens at the Tower now that Merlina has departed. As queen raven, she was the ruler of the roost.
The Ravenmaster, Christopher Skaithe, 55, mourning his favourite raven, was all over the media. This was the stuff of nightmares for him. At the time of her disappearance, he said, ‘I know so many of you lovely folk will be saddened by this news. None more than me. Please excuse my absence for a few days.’
Only in October, he was telling my grandchildren, on a trip to the Tower, how Merlina, when she felt unloved, rolled onto her back, put her feet in the air and pretended she was dead.
Like his ravens, Skaith was a naughty boy – so much so that his mother took him at the age of 15 to the Army Careers Office and enrolled him as a boy soldier.
It was an inspired decision. He became, over time, a warrant officer, a drum major and a specialist machinegunner in what became the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, serving all over the world. Skaithe is a keen nature-lover and Belize with its jungle was his favourite.
Twenty-five years later, in 2008, his wife accompanied him to the interview for the position of Yeoman Warder at the Tower. ‘I’ve only ever done two job interviews in my life and each time I had a good woman beside me.’
There are 30 Yeoman Warders, including two women, who all previously held impeccable records for at least 22 years in the armed forces. ‘Twenty-two years of not being caught,’ laughs Skaithe.
In blue ‘undress’ uniform. The raven was the first born in the Tower for 30 years
They live with their families in their own flats or houses in the Tower – though during lockdowns Skaithe’s wife and daughter have spent time at their home in Kent.
Their famous uniforms are individually made to measure and supplied free. The day-to-day, blue ‘undress’ uniform of Tudor bonnet, trousers and red-trimmed tabard (under which Skaithe wears his own T-shirt printed with ravens) was redesigned in the Victorian era to be more comfortable.
Each uniform is worth £700. To allow for frequent dry-cleaning (done in the Tower), each Yeoman Warder has half a dozen of these: entertaining and guiding hundreds of tourists (167,000 visited the Tower in the 2019 Easter holidays) can be sweaty work.
Skaithe is particularly proud of his arm badge – he is the only person in the
world who can legitimately wear it – an oval disc decorated with ravens, a laurel wreath and a crown.
The Beefeaters (incidentally, many of them are vegetarians or vegans these days) wear their famous state dress uniform, the one on the gin bottle, only about ten times a year, for
State occasions, such as firing the salute on the Queen’s birthday.
The dress uniform dates from Henry VIII’S time. With its rosette-trimmed breeches, tights and ruff, it is extremely uncomfortable – ‘but you feel like a million dollars wearing it’.
Each Beefeater also has a sword and a spear-like halberd, designed to pull knights off horses. The whole ensemble costs as much as a Dior gown – there’s 230 feet of gold braid on the tunic alone.
The Tower has its own gym, but Skaithe says he gets enough exercise chasing his ravens around. Besides, he thinks that a Beefeater looks better with a bit of a belly.
His job is to let the birds out of their enclosure at daybreak and gather them in at dusk. Their wings are partially clipped, but they can still fly out of the Tower grounds – as did Merlina.
Skaithe doesn’t like to pet his ravens. He thinks it’s important that they remain wild. He feeds them rats, mice, meat from Smithfield and his own concoction: yummy snacks of biscuits soaked in blood.
He has spent the best part of his life in one uniform or another and likes it that way – no decisions to be made each day. So much so that he has developed his own off-duty uniform, as dashing as any of the others – a tie, waistcoat and tweed jacket.